An Intro to Chicago Bop, the City's Latest Collision of Dance and Rap

The video for drill pioneer King Louie's "My Niggaz", a highlight from his late 2012 tape Drilluminati, is fairly typical as far as what you'd expect from a Chicago rap video in 2013: glimpses of Louie and friends posted up on icy corners and stoops, all fairly grim aside from Louie's charisma. What really catches your eye is the kid dancing in the background-- all elbows and knees, fluid yet precise, almost silly but enigmatically sexy. The style is called bopping, and the majority of the comments on the video (now at over a million views) are about this scene-stealing dancer, Kemo-- known in his hometown as the King of Bop. When one commenter asks who the dancer is, another replies, "that's Lil Kemo look him up, you got 'thots' in yo name like you from Chi and you don't know him?"

"People send me their songs, hit me up for videos, cause when I bop to it, their song gets a buzz," Kemo says when I talk to him over the phone, confident but still a bit incredulous at his celebrity. He started uploading videos of himself bopping on his Youtube channel last summer, usually in the basement or backyard. "It used to be everyone would just do a simple move with their elbows and call it the bop. We started to get creative with it, and everyone's doing it that way now. We don't really practice moves, we just do it. It's just turning up."

Aesthetically bopping tends toward business on the bottom, party on top—quick and loose butterfly knees and steps, a weird hybrid of footwork's freneticism smoothed out with a touch of stepping (as popularized by Chicago's own Pied Piper of R&B), coupled with freestyle arm moves often reminiscent of Lil B's cooking dance on steroids. In essence it's a physical representation of Chicago music in 2013: the warped yet indelible imprint of house, mutating under hip-hop's influence into juke, growing more combative and experimental and shifting the focus from ass to feet via footwork, with rap ultimately reigning supreme. Bopping, like most of the music and dance incubated in the south and west sides of Chicago over the last few decades, strikes a fine balance between approachability and experimentation. Heavy doses of weirdness are mitigated by the democracy of the pure, undeniable turn-up.

2013 has been the summer of bop in Chicago. "If you come out here, I guarantee you, you will see kids from three years old, 15 years old, doing this dance somewhere right now, to Future, Rich Homie Quan," Kemo says. "When I first started doing it I wasn't really thinking nothing of it. It's to the point now where I can't even really go outside anymore. It's overwhelming."

As the dance has become more ubiquitous, the accompanying music has grown more specific, though the musical counterpart is still far less of a solidified "thing." Kemo's early Youtube videos were usually set to nationally recognizable hits (Future's "Double Cup & Molly,"Chief Keef's "Love Sosa"), but more recently, likely due to increasing amounts of requests from Chicago rappers, the track selection has become localized, featuring songs like Shawty Doo's "It's Foreign" and Stunt Taylor's "All I Know" that the average non-Chicagoan would presumably be hearing for the first time. Meanwhile the influx of tracks explicitly about bopping (either with "bop" in the title, or the hashtag #BOPPIN appended to the description) on Chicago-centric Youtube channels and blogs like Fake Shore Drive has increased exponentially over the course of the year.

The style of music rising along with bopping is easier to define in contrast with the current stereotypes of popular Chicago rap, namely drill—lurching, foreboding beats, deadpan delivery, nihilistic lyrical content (though clearly artists considered to be part of the drill scene defy these stereotypes with regularity). Bop songs, like the dance itself, are buoyant, upbeat and heavily reliant on autotune rap-singing, indebted far more to the Atlanta Future currently dominates than the Atlanta Luger once did (as the drill sound tends toward). There are certainly moments of overlap between drill and bop sounds: see Lil Durk's "Molly Girl," Chief Keef's "Save That Shit," King Louie and Lil Durk's "Want It All." But a crop of up and coming artists—Breezy Montana, Lil Chris, Sicko Mobb, Shawty Doo, Lil Tay, Trilla, Stunt Taylor, and the producer/rapper Leekeleek (Chicago's answer to Nard & B, Atlanta's go-to production duo for sparkly, hook-y autotune perfection)—have made the sound a staple over the past year, typically either featuring bopping in their own videos or sending their songs to Kemo, his friend and peer D.low and other dancers (including Wala Cam, a long-standing local dance-centric website and youtube channel run by promoter and talent scout Wala Williams, who's gradually shifted his focus from footwork to bop). Like drill in its infancy (and other localized dance scenes like the late-00s jerkin wave), bopping is a grassroots movement, spreading primarily through youtube, local schools, and at fiestas, the colloquial term for bopping functions.

Although, like juke and footwork before it, the exact origins of the bopping movement are nebulous, it's not a stretch to view DJ Nate's transition over the last couple years from footwork wunderkind to autotune rap-crooner as pivotal in its development. Though largely known for his geeked-up pop and rap-sampling footwork tracks, ultimately released as a compilation on London's Planet Mu in 2010, Nate shifted drastically to rap and r&b with his 2012 "Flexx Washington" mixtape. Though the transformation was largely seen as a downgrade by fans of his older productions, it included the chirpy, triumphant "Gucci Goggles," which would become a youtube hit and local radio success.

"Gucci Goggles" contains the DNA for much of the 2013 bopping soundtrack; in the hook itself Nate sings, "I jack, I ball, I bop, I flex." But the boundaries of bopping are still being felt out, and for now, one can bop to anything with an infectious enough beat. "French Montana, Waka Flocka... but especially techno," says Kemo. "That's the best, when techno come on? We gonna kill everything."